Fedlet development is currently DORMANT

PLEASE NOTE: At present (October 2016), I do not have any time to work on Fedlet. Through the magic of Google, this looks like a current effort to get Linux (Ubuntu) running on Baytrail / Cherrytrail devices; you might want to try that.

Fedlet

This is Fedlet, a Fedora remix for Intel Bay Trail-based tablet devices with 32-bit firmwares. Particularly the Dell Venue 8 Pro, which is what I have. It has been reported to work on the Lenovo Miix 2 and Asus T100. It may work on the Toshiba Encore and any other 32-bit firmware Bay Trail-based tablet.

It’s based on Fedora 23, more or less – but it has a slightly patched kernel, and a few other tweaks. Some of the Bay Trail support is not yet complete, and testers on various devices have reported instability. So this is not yet stable release quality, but it’s appropriate for playing around with these devices. Seriously, I mean it’s pretty experimental and nothing is guaranteed. This is for playing around and helping to make things better, it’s not a production OS. Please don’t install this if for some reason your Intel tablet is your primary work device or something.

Updated to 3.16 kernel with small Baytrail patch set, native modesetting should now work, no more hard-coded resolution hacks needed

Sound driver and firmware included (but you still need to load a correct ALSA config to hear sound)

Partial support for Venue 8 Pro built-in wireless (firmware included)

Hardware button support for Venue 8 Pro

Battery status support

Install broken (missing efibootmgr)

20140310

Fifth release of Fedlet

Fedlet 20140310 for 8″, 800×1280 tablets

Updated base packages and kernel

Xorg hack to allow windows with integrated title bars to be dragged in GNOME (from Jan-Michael Brummer)

20140226

Fourth release of Fedlet

Latest Fedora Rawhide base

Kernel update: based on latest Rawhide, sound (and LPSS) support built in (but not working until you provide fw_sst_0f28.bin* in /usr/lib/firmware/intel and apply this mixer config), shutdown/reboot should work on Venue 8 Pro, T100 and Miix 2

GNOME Terminal added to the Dash for convenience

Updated the patched anaconda to latest Rawhide

LibreOffice dropped to save space (I doubt anyone wants to use it on a tablet much…)

20140221

Third release of Fedlet

Fix kernel performance regression

Touch input rotation seems to work automagically now, so drop it from v8p-rotate (it’s now just a simple xrandr wrapper)

Add a 10in (T100) build (untested)

20140220

Second release of Fedlet

Repository configuration added (package: fedlet-repo)

Useless custom build of xorg-x11-drv-intel dropped

Kernel up to 3.14rc3 with some patches upstreamed, display hotplug reversion patch dropped and video= parameter adjusted to allow display to work with the hotplug reversion patch dropped

Partly working

Suspend (kinda works since kernel 3.16 or so, but screen backlight may stay on, and various things may not survive the resume, e.g. touchscreen or rotation)

Not working

Venue 8 Pro onboard Bluetooth

Icon for rotation app is invisible with recent GNOME

Most likely lots of other things

Unknown (please let me know!)

Hardware support (wireless, bluetooth etc) on devices other than Venue 8 Pro

Usage

Not for 64-bit firmwares

64-bit firmware Bay Trail devices are showing up now: I wouldn’t recommend using Fedlet on those, probably, as most of the point of Fedlet is to be a 32-bit UEFI image for the 32-bit firmware Bay Trail devices. If you have a 64-bit firmware Bay Trail device, I’d probably suggest installing Fedora 21 Beta (or a Final TC/RC) then updating to a 3.18 kernel from the rawhide-kernel-nodebug repository. I could do a 64-bit build of the Fedlet kernel and the few other divergent packages, I guess.

Writing the image to USB

You can follow the standard Fedora USB writing instructions – both livecd-iso-to-disk --format --reset-mbr --efi and dd like methods should work. Do not use Rufus, unetbootin or any other ‘smart’ third party USB stick writer. They rarely work correctly, especially for UEFI booting. Tools that work like dd (several are mentioned on the page linked above) are fine.

Booting from USB on Venue 8 Pro

To boot from USB on the Venue 8 Pro, turn it off, connect the USB stick, then hold down the volume up button immediately after pressing the power button, until you see the Dell logo. This should take you into a boot menu from which you can pick your USB stick. You can also hold volume down to get into the firmware UI, where you can go to the Boot tab and move the USB stick up to the top position in the boot order (see note above about how different boot paths impact graphics).

Notes and tips

Native graphics on Venue 8 Pro

It seems to vary between devices, but I have found that graphics don’t work properly on the Venue 8 Pro (screen goes black when KMS kicks in) if you boot normally or through the firmware UI (hold volume down on boot). KMS always works if you boot through the boot device menu (hold volume up on boot). If you have a V8P and you’re getting the black-screen-on-boot problem, try different boot paths.

Sound

On most hardware, you should be able to make sound work with this ALSA state file. Download it and run alsactl -f /path/to/t100_B.state restore.

Connecting USB devices

If you don’t know this already you probably shouldn’t be playing with Fedlet, but in order to connect any USB devices, you need something called a “USB OTG cable”, which basically turns the micro-USB port on the tablet into a ‘regular’ USB port you can plug keyboards and USB sticks and things into. Available at any decent parts retailer for about $5, or any big box electronics store for about $25. Your choice.

If wifi isn’t working on your device, you can plug in a wireless USB adapter if you have a USB OTG adapter. I’m using an Asus USB-N10, it should work out of the box.

For ease of testing it’s probably a good idea to have a USB hub you can plug a wireless adapter (if needed), USB stick(s) and keyboard into.

Firefox extensions

Video playback acceleration

If you are legally allowed to – I can’t tell you whether you are or not, I am not a lawyer – you can install the libva-intel-driver package from RPM Fusion’s free repository. This will enable hardware-accelerated video playback in any app which speaks libva (for me, it fails on quite a few videos, have to dig into that).

Installation

If you’re very, very bold, you should be able to install Fedlet. On the Venue 8 Pro, the internal storage has a fairly big NTFS partition with Windows on it, and a bunch of smaller partitions. I’d recommend just destroying the big Windows partition and installing into that space: the other partitions are system and recovery partitions, if you leave them intact, it should be possible to recover the Windows installation later if you want to (I have not tested this).

If you do install this, get kernel updates from [my repository][19], and don’t install official kernel updates from the Fedora repos. We’re trying to get all the patches merged ASAP. I’ll try and remember to put updated kernel builds in my repo regularly. Stock kernels will now boot, at least, but (as of 3.16) shutdown/reboot may not work, battery status won’t work, and Venue 8 Pro wifi won’t work.

On the Venue 8 Pro at least, the firmware has an irritating habit of putting the Windows boot loader back at the top of the UEFI boot manager list if you attach or remove USB sticks (or sometimes, just for giggles). If you boot it with this setup it’ll go into Windows auto-recovery. I haven’t been brave enough to see what this does yet, I just force power off and go back into the firmware and put Fedlet (“Generic”) back at the top of the list.

What’s in it that’s different from Fedora?

The ‘sources’ for the outside-of-Fedora stuff that’s included in the image can be found in this github repository. There are:

Some kernel patches in the kernel/ directory which are applied to the kernel package in the image

Some Xorg config snippets and a trivial utility for rotating the screen on the Venue 8 Pro, in the xorg/ directory

The kickstart used to build the image, and a patch to python-imgcreate for building UEFI bootable 32-bit live images, in the ks/ directory

The patch that (hopefully) makes installation work smoothly in the anaconda/ directory

The necessary firmware for the Venue 8 Pro’s wifi adapter in the baytrail-firmware/ directory

The repository definition for the fedlet repo in the fedlet-repo/ directory

A (hopefully) working ALSA configuration file in the alsa/ directory

The packages that differ from pure Fedora Rawhide are all available from [this repository][19]. There is:

A backport of Rawhide’s linux-firmware package, which contains the firmware needed for the sound adapter

All the variant packages have the dist tag ‘awb’ to make them easily distinguishable from official Fedora packages (except the linux-firmware package, which is just a backport).

The image should be roughly reproducible by just building a live image, using the kickstart, from a running Fedora 21 system, after applying the patch to python-imgcreate’s /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/imgcreate/live.py.

I cannot take any of the credit for the hard work on this: all I’ve done is write silly little scripts and stick the bits together. Multiple folks at Intel, Red Hat and elsewhere have done the tough work. An especial big thanks to Alan Coxm Aubrey Li, and Mika Westerberg at Intel, Jan-Michael Brummer at IAV (formerly of Intel), and Kalle Valo at Qualcomm (for the V8P wifi) who are really pushing the thing along.

548 Responses

Hi, I have fedlet on my venue 11, but it occasionally hangs and I’m forced to turn it off by holding the power button. I haven’t noticed others reporting that, so I’m confused – is it only me, or does fedlet hang occasionally?

Cool, we can post here again.
Just wanted to report that my Nextbook 8 still doesn’t work properly with kernel 4.1.0. Very unstable. I did find some drivers that may work for the nextbook 8 peripherals but were out-of-kernel. Will have to see if these android dkms will work with mainline. And I hope these drivers will be incorporated into mainline someday, the drivers are GPL…
I’d like to see my backlight turn on and off, and the machine suspend or low power someday. Finally tried booting into Windows without activating, seems like something that I’d use, if it’d run Linux stably… and ascertained that /dev/ttyS1 (HSUART) should be connected to the bluetooth radio on the RTL8723BS on the Nextbook 8.

Has anyone tried this on the newer dell venue pro 8 5000?
Also does anyone have any idea if fedora will pick up this project or what is the future of linux with tablets?
AFAIK this is it unless you count some very old and very large older laptops.

Newer tablets with 64-bit firmwares should be basically supported by mainstream distributions. The remaining delta in fedlet aside from the 32-bit UEFI hacks is not large and is mostly stuff that could be rolled into a regular distribution.

The 5000 apparently still has a 32-bit firmware. I don’t have one and have no idea how well it works.

Bastien Nocera is doing a bit of fedlet-ish work ATM and has a more recent build that works, but is having trouble de-branding it so can’t distribute it widely yet.

How hard would it be to make the WiFi work on another distro for the DV8Pro? I’ve discovered that the latest Debian release supports 32-bit UEFI out of the box, even booting to the 64-bit kernel, etc. I jumped up to Debian Sid (unstable), and I’ve found that everything works well enough, but my most major problem is getting my WiFi to work. Any ideas?

Anyone know much about the so-called “connected standby” mode that Windows has, and how it should relate to Linux? I suppose Android should be taking advantage of this hardware feature, but due to the problem of legacy applications, wonder how this feeds back to mainline. This should be the way that tablets handle “suspend” instead of going through real S3 suspend or S4 hibernate…

Wow, thanks for the update. This works pretty nicely on my Acer Switch 10 Bay Trail. You do have to delete all existing linux partitions or the installer crashes. And I see what you mean about the “OK” button being hidden- careful use of the TAB key worked for me to install.

But it comes up and almost everything but the keyboard works on the Switch-10. Wifi and the touch-pad and touch-screen all work fine. So far it seems quite stable.

That sounds likely, yeah. The remaining delta in Fedlet aside from the 32-bit UEFI hacks is almost entirely V8P-specific (a couple of patches for the wifi, which work, and a bigger patch series for the backlight which doesn’t, which I’ll need to look into when I’m back from Flock). The only other thing is the new GTK+ popover patch, which is just a nice-to-have and easy to build for x86_64 if you feel inclined.

The tablet is really good, yes. It lacks some features (no GPS, LTE) but compensates with a really beautiful and sharp high-res (2048 x 1536) screen. Gnome runs really good on it, although a bit laggish (because of TSC vs. HPET).

I researched it a little more and it seems that this tablet too has the 32bit bios although it could have 64bit. Is that accurate? Call me a conspiracy nut but I think the powers that be are trying to limit a free tablet from existing.

Hi pcurcuei, I either have a X98 II plus, i tried several times to boot any live image (ubuntu, mint, debian) but without result; always I get multiple errors on boot and then a message about ‘unable to find live squash filesystem’ or similar, I can’t remebre well; so, if you have a running Debian on, may you instruct about booting and installation? I don’t want to use Windows and Android it’s not the best for what I wanto to do with it

The new build (20150810) seems to be working great (on DV8P)- almost production ready for me, except for a few small snags. I’m getting some odd freezes and the like, probably just X… I tested Wayland just once and it seemed to perform pretty well, but rotation didn’t seem to be working… does it still need to be baked in? Do you think we’ll get there anytime soon?

Thermals on the CPU also keep going crazy over time, like whenever I watch Netflix for more than fifteen minutes… then it seems to start freezing up/overheating, requiring a restart. Has any work been done to do CPU throttling when needed, or is this just me/am I (possibly) just conveniently freezing up for other reasons?

I’m assuming Bluetooth is still a long ways away?

Other than those small problems, things are overall working great so far- keep up the good work! I think I’m close to the point where I could use this to (maybe!) replace my laptop, if I can find an appropriate keyboard of some sort working! Cheers!

I haven’t tried or looked into Wayland on the fedlet, so I don’t know about that – sorry. I also haven’t watched video for anything like 15 minutes…honestly what I mostly do with fedlet is boot it up and press things for like five minutes then go ‘yup, that looks like it’s working’ and do something else.

I did notice mine got very hot when installing, so it seems entirely reasonable that it might overheat when playing back video. I’m pretty sure frequency scaling is already in there, it may not be aggressive enough for the hardware, though. This is something that’d probably be worth an upstream kernel bug report.

I have not looked into Bluetooth at all.

“I think I’m close to the point where I could use this to (maybe!) replace my laptop”

Hi,
Thx for great work! This is only one linux distbution ready for setup on Intel Bay Trail hw. without any magic.
Of course there are some problems but it’s works!
I tried to setup it with China’s noname mini pc with Intel Bay Trail. Live system run ok, but setup procedure failed, anacodna got some errors and isntallation stops. Could please give an advise how to fix it or some workaround.

Hi,
only for information: I’v tried to install the last release (20150810) on HP pavillion X2 k000n but the installation crashes during the boot (after the “dancing hotdog”) and give a terminal line.
It’s a pity, I’ll continue looking for a mode to install linux on the tablet…
Thanks for your job!

Hi, I’m Cris. I’ve a Chuwi VX8 3G, 1 Gb ram, 8″ and 16 Gb SSD version. I’ve had success on being able to boot the latest version 10.08.2015 of Fedlet distro but I’m still without touch 🙁 My Tablet seems to have a Silead touch, Silead is the brand I think, infact the driver for Windows 8.1 and 10 is by Silead… Could you suggest me what to do in order to make it working fine under Fedlet ? 🙂 Thank you very much.

Hi, I tried to install fedlet on my Dell Venue 8 Pro, and I aborted the installation since I couldn’t find an “OK” button after selecting the partition. Now the installer crashes since the linux boot has been installed, and I can’t even repair Windows. Would installing gparted on the live USB and formatting all the hard disk work?

You are referring to the older Dell Venue 8 Pro right? If the Ok button was missing perhaps it was off screen? (And if so Alt + Drag). Anyway I don’t think you’ve installed anything. There is a single go button that is clicked or not, there is no partial install possible (to my knowledge). I suggest you remove the usb drive and reboot it a couple of times. Windows should come back and then retry the installation.

Thank you. Yes, mine’s the older version. I couldn’t revert to windows since I had already deleted it. Eventually I solved my problem radically: I formated the whole hard disk with blevit-gui from the live usb and installed fedlet there, so there’s not a trace of windows now 🙂 The only problem is that I have to boot from the bios menu and not from the grub menu. Otherwise X won’t load.

Thanks for the update. I haven’t blown windows away but the very second I get asked to install the new version of windows I’m blowing that garbage away. My only sticking point is that I sort of hate gnome and there isn’t a gesture based desktop cube effect (I’ve come to depend on this).

Hi,
I was trying to install this on my Colorovo Citytab Supreme 3G and i have a BLACK SCREEN, same goes for debian 8.2 after installation, and ubuntu with bootia32.efi file – every single distro with 32bit efi gives me black screen…

Anyone working on getting these patches merged mainline (for the DV8P primarily in my case?) I think Debian Sid could work very well if we can get the accelerated graphics working by default and the WiFi patches into the mainline kernel- it already supports 32-bit UEFI, and then the open-sourceness will take its course in making the rest of bugfixing and hardware support a breeze.

Is there anything I could do to help? File a bug report for the WiFi in Debian, for example? I have no idea what I’m doing, so any tips would be good!

Thanks for all the effort you have put into this project. I’m hoping you have the time to help me out with an issue I’m having with Fedora and my RCA Cambio. I tried the latest version of Fedlet, which booted fine. However, most of the patches were not compatible with my hardware and I encountered some stability issues.

So, I decided to install Fedora 23-x86_64 MATE directly to a 32GB USB flash drive for testing. I didn’t want to install to the internal drive until most of the major issues were resolved. After fully installing F23, it would not boot directly from the flash drive. When I copied over BOOTIA32.efi from fedlet, it dropped to a grub prompt. When I manually enter the grub commands to boot, the system just resets.

I decided to try the baytail-bootia32.efi-master from 2/21/2015, which also dropped me to the grub shell. However, I could manually enter the grub commands and boot into F23 using that version of bootia32.efi. I had to include the clocksource=tsc kernel argument, in order to maintain stability in F23. I was also able to update my system and compile the Realtek RTL8723BS Wireless firmware drivers, which work fine on the Cambio.

That’s where I’m at now with the Cambio & Fedora 23. I was hoping you might be able to suggest a method that will allow me to avoid dropping to the grub prompt, and boot directly to Fedora. This is actually the first time I’ve delved into EFI boot and it’s pretty confusing on these baytrail devices. Here are the partitions on my 32GB USB flash drive.

I’ve just seen a kernel patch which might be of interest to people here.

From the description:

mmc: sdhci-acpi: Reduce Baytrail eMMC/SD/SDIO hangs
Baytrail eMMC/SD/SDIO host controllers have been known to hang. A change to a hardware setting has been found to reduce the occurrence of such hangs. This patch ensures the correct setting.

Any news on any of the other patches/fixes being pushed upstream (e.g. GPU fixes, wifi patch, touch as well?) Debian has the install issues with 32 bit UEFI fixed, you can actually get it to boot and install a 64 bit version on 32 bit UEFI with everything stock, but I’ve always run into issues with accelerated graphics which I can sometimes fix with nomodeset in GRUB, which annoys the crap outta me because people have Android running with accelerated graphics fine and Fedlet works great with accelerated graphics yet I can’t for the life of me figure out how or why these things still don’t work upstream nearly about a year later! If I knew what to do, I would file a bug report, but I have no idea where to do it or how!
Thanks!
Ben

I still need nomodeset on kernel 4.6rc4. i915 on baytrail is still a mess. Goodix touch screen should work out of box on newer kernel. rtl8723bs got stable wifi/bluetooth for about 3 months. alsa showed up since kernel 4.5 despite only making funny sound. after nearly 2 years, my teclast x80h is still unusable.

See my other post below, the person there has figured out a ton of crap. I’m afraid it may not all apply with your device, but it’s probably a good read anyways (he’s done a lot of power management research, which seems to be a major bug with Bay Trail at the moment as far as pstates not switching correctly.)

I am also an Archer. And I own both T100TA and X80H both running on the kernel with patches from Ubuntu community. Their kernel patch is newer albeit different but also include the patch for V8P. So, I don’t think the blog is of much help if only T100TA works. Besides, X80H use XPOWER PMIC, which is different from V8P/T100TA (CrystalCove).

Found someone ( http://www.studioteabag.com/science/dell-venue-pro-linux/ ) who’s actively working on the Dell Venue 8 and 11 Pro and seems to be making awesome progress (albeit with Arch and not Fedora.) There’s been fairly regular updates and he’s been citing back to this page several times throughout his posts (e.g. for the Wifi patch.) I’m going to see if I can get as much of his stuff working in Debian, as that currently requires no UEFI hacks to boot by default.

UPDATE: I’ve gotten Accelerated Graphics to work! Took some fiddling with GRUB config files, but studioteabag’s method worked! The one discrepancy is that he is using MATE instead of Gnome Shell, and I’m not sure why screen rotation isn’t working. Let me explain: iio-sensor-proxy should be integrating with Gnome to autorotate the screen from the internal sensors (as does Fedlet v. 11 if I remember right,) but for some reason nothing is happening. I tested xrandr and it can rotate things just fine, more time is needed for further testing.

This comment section has had some problems with spammers and just not working. Not to fault adamw I think it’s some 3rd party tool he threw in. Go ahead and post it spacing it out, I’d like to see what you have.

Has someone managed to compile drivers on the latest available version? I need to make a driver for the wireless chip rtl8723bs and a new one for the integrated wired dm9621a usb to fast ethernet bridge as it is not recognizing plugged in cables.
Everytime I try to make things it is complaining about “make[1]: *** /lib/modules/4.2.0-0.rc6.git0.1.1awb.i686/build: Datei oder Verzeichnis nicht gefunden. Schluss.” Stopped because he could not fing file or folder. I figured that “build” is a symlink to /usr/src/kernels/4.2.0-0.rc6.git0.1.1awb.i686, but this kernel source folder only contains “4.5.7-200.fc23.i686” as a folder. I tried to recreate the symlink to point at that folder, but it is still not working. Even tried installing the kernel headers and sources for this version, but it seems like the used kernel is too specific.
Does anybody have a clue or a fix here? I am out of luck with my knowledge. :/

I know this stuff is old work – any update though, about what has been included (or not) in the kernel upstream? (and in other packages?)
I managed to boot F24 and F25 fine (with nomodeset) on the T100HA, the wireless card is not detected (I suppose that’s fine with the rpmfusion package or the one in your repo). So before going forward with the installation, I was curious to know how much work I can expect, since Fedlet is not updated anymore…

sorry, I’m not doing anything on this any more. I believe there are still groups around who are working on this stuff, I don’t know which are active, your best bet is to poke around Ubuntu forums and G+ a bit.

The patches for the Venue 8 Pro wireless never fully made it upstream. I dunno about the T100.

As 4.x kernel progresses apparently more support for the Bay Trail atom processors. I have a Lenovo Ideapad 100S-11IBY off ebay with a FUBAR win10 on its way. My guess, one of the infinite mega updates didnt take. Hey ok by me, didnt want win10, and it made it cheap as former owner didnt want to mess with it.

So been reading. Apparently right now there is a version of Ubuntu that sorta works without lot hacking. Mint too. But the best seems a distribution called Sparky Linux. I think current version is 4.4. You want the 32bit version, it comes with support for 32bit UEFI. Get it, install it, and update kernel to 4.7. Apparently the only thing that doesnt work out of box on Ideapad coming my way using Sparky is the wifi though your mileage may vary depending what Bay Trail wonder you have and what hardware. Though frankly I have several usb wifi adapters around that are friendly to linux out of box. So cant see worrying too much about the built in adapter.

Please read the note at the top of the screen. This is an old, obsolete project and you shouldn’t use it any more. The download links have been intentionally removed (the downloads are no longer there in any case).